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Date:   Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:32:40 +0100
From:   Daniel Thompson <daniel.thompson@linaro.org>
To:     Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Cc:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Jason Wessel <jason.wessel@windriver.com>,
        Douglas Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>,
        sumit.garg@linaro.org, pmladek@suse.com,
        sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com, will@kernel.org,
        kgdb-bugreport@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        patches@linaro.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] kgdb: Honour the kprobe blacklist when setting
 breakpoints
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On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 09:42:09PM +0900, Masami Hiramatsu wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 16:29:53 +0200
> Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 02:21:26PM +0100, Daniel Thompson wrote:
> > > kgdb has traditionally adopted a no safety rails approach to breakpoint
> > > placement. If the debugger is commanded to place a breakpoint at an
> > > address then it will do so even if that breakpoint results in kgdb
> > > becoming inoperable.
> > > 
> > > A stop-the-world debugger with memory peek/poke does intrinsically
> > > provide its operator with the means to hose their system in all manner
> > > of exciting ways (not least because stopping-the-world is already a DoS
> > > attack ;-) ) but the current no safety rail approach is not easy to
> > > defend, especially given kprobes provides us with plenty of machinery to
> > > mark parts of the kernel where breakpointing is discouraged.
> > > 
> > > This patchset introduces some safety rails by using the existing
> > > kprobes infrastructure. It does not cover all locations where
> > > breakpoints can cause trouble but it will definitely block off several
> > > avenues, including the architecture specific parts that are handled by
> > > arch_within_kprobe_blacklist().
> > > 
> > > This patch is an RFC because:
> > > 
> > > 1. My workstation is still chugging through the compile testing.
> > > 
> > > 2. Patch 4 needs more runtime testing.
> > > 
> > > 3. The code to extract the kprobe blacklist code (patch 4 again) needs
> > >    more review especially for its impact on arch specific code.
> > > 
> > > To be clear I do plan to do the detailed review of the kprobe blacklist
> > > stuff but would like to check the direction of travel first since the
> > > change is already surprisingly big and maybe there's a better way to
> > > organise things.
> > 
> > Thanks for doing these patches, esp 1-3 look very good to me.
> > 
> > I've taken the liberty to bounce the entire set to Masami-San, who is
> > the kprobes maintainer for comments as well.
> 
> Thanks Peter to Cc me.
> 
> Reusing kprobe blacklist is good to me as far as it doesn't expand it
> only for kgdb. For example, if a function which can cause a recursive
> trap issue only when the kgdb puts a breakpoint, it should be covered
> by kgdb blacklist, or we should make a "noinstr-list" including
> both :)

Recursion is what focuses the mind but I don't think we'd need
recursion for there to be problems.

For example taking a kprobe trap whilst executing the kgdb trap handler
(or vice versa) is already likely to be fragile and is almost certainly
untested on most or all architectures. Further if I understood Peter's
original nudge correctly then, in addition, x86 plans to explicitly
prohibit this anyway.

On other words I think there will only be one blacklist.


> Thus, Nack for PATCH 4/4, that seems a bit selfish change. If kgdb wants
> to use the "kprobes blacklist", we should make CONFIG_KGDB depending on
> CONFIG_KPROBES.

Some of the architectures currently have kgdb support but do not have
kprobes...


> Or, (as I pointed) we should make independent "noinstr-list"
> and use it from both.

This sounds like this wouldn't really be a functional change over
what I have proposed. More like augmenting it with a massive symbol
rename (and maybe a little bit of extra code movement in the headers
to give us linux/noinstr.h).

Taking my cues from things like set_fs() I originally decided to keep
away from such a big rename ;-) .

Personally I'm open to a rename. I could write PATCH 4/4 assuming a
rename will come (e.g. different naming for new files and Kconfig
options) and follow that with an automatically generated
rename patch (or patches).


Daniel.